Horsing Around

Horses are called Equi, & have that name for they are ioyned and coupled in cartes or in Chariots, even and not odde, and they be also coupled in shape and in course. Also the horse is called Caballus, and hath that name of his hollow feete: for he maketh therewith a cave or a pit in the ground there he goeth, and ther beasts have no such feet, as Isidore saith.  (Bartholomew Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, ed. and trans. by Batman, 1582)

I have no insights to give as regards the horse – severe allergies dictate that, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t really get near one. But I have seen A View to a Kill, and therefore know all about that mad French aristocrat whose house and stables Christopher Walken bought so that he could genetically engineer racehorses with the use of microchips and thus trigger a colossal earthquake in the San Fernando valley and kill everyone except Grace Jones and some Japanese businessmen, or something. [This is obviously an exaggeration: Zorin tried to kill Grace Jones.]

But even though I have nothing to say about them, they crop all over the shop in the art and literature of the late middle ages. Chaucer tells us a great deal about the personality of his pilgrims when he reveals what sort of horse they ride in his General Prologue, and Sir Orfeo’s encounter with ‘syxty ladys on palferays’ shows the glamour and power of the fairy court. In the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry the month of May is illustrated with a hunting party of young, leaf-wearing nobles, while Sir Geoffrey Luttrell’s equestrian portrait raises eyebrows and slightly smutty questions.

Laddes (and ladyes) on toure.

Of the Medieval Horses I Have Known, my favourite is undoubtedly Gringolet, Sir Gawain’s longsuffering steed. At a close second is the horse that

myght such a hwe lach

As growe grene as the gres and grener hit semed,

Then grene aumayl on golde glowande bryȝter

of the same poem. Arthur’s knights are always getting theirs smoted or torn tobrast, which is rather wasteful. [Is this what a brony is? I don’t know. One senses an undercurrent of smut in that too.] Dame Triamour shows up on the blingiest pony ever to rescue Sir Launfal from the conflicting, and equally untrue, accusations of homosexuality and attempting to seduce Queen Guinevere.

Missing two birds with one stone.

These betoken wealth, social status, military reputation – hardly the most representative features of any society. What about the workhorses used for ploughing fields and pulling carts? Or the horses whose milk was used by the steppe tribes of northern Eurasia, of whom Adam of Bremen writes,

They use their milk and blood as drink so freely that they are said to become intoxicated. (trans. Tschan, 1955)

Or indeed, what about the horses on which the Mongols swept across central Asia, and to which one could easily apply the words Leviores pardis equi eius, et velociores lupis vespertinis […] Equites namque eius de longo venient – what about them?

Kung Hei Fat Choy.

Hæppy Ænniversary

With due respect to our Australian cousins, the big party this weekend is, of course, the 255^th birthday of Robert Burns. With due commiseration to our American cousins, south of the border many of us celebrate this ardently. Despite having fewer than four Actual Scots in the graduate student body, Burns Night is taken pretty seriously [Grad Haggis? Graggis?]. Is this, inadvertently or otherwise, rampant cultural nationalism? And why isn’t there an English equivalent? Shakespeare’s birthday unfortunately clashes with the genuinely nationalist St George’s Day, I am the only person I know who celebrates Tennyson’s birthday, and that sounded a lot less weird in my head.

I do seriously like Burns, but I feel rather conflicted about his poem ‘Scots Wha Hae’ for a variety of reasons: the tune is a bit tricky; by dint of its being The Song of the Scottish National Party, I see Alex Salmond’s face every time I read it; the last verse’s statement that ‘Tyrants fall in every foe’ steamrollers over the fairly important difference between commanders or knights and ordinary foot soldiers that was of course as much of a distinction in 1314 as it was in 1914, and we don’t hear Messrs Gove and Hunt squabbling about that; Mel Gibson; and because ‘do or die’, though excellent (and used by Tennyson), has lost much of its currency by dint of its popularity.

This year is going to be a fairly important one for centenaries. Between ‘FREEEEEDOM!’ and the Western Front, GCSE history boards are spoiled for choice. But imagine for a moment that you aren’t sitting a history GCSE this year.

It has been argued by the journalist Hannah Betts that the great, forgotten centenary for 2014 is the accession of the House of Hanover in 1714 (the Georgians, in layman’s terms) – but since the House of Hanover is still alive and well, albeit under a different name, and since the current reigning Hanover had a colossal stream of parties not two years ago, we should probably cool it on the Hanovers.

In my view, the great, forgotten centenary this year is the short-lived reinstatement of Æthelred the Unready as King of England, following the death of the Danish Sweyn Forkbeard in 1014. Forced to flee the kingdom after years of rotten luck, Æthelred returned to power for just a year before his son Edmund Ironside (whom I’ve always slightly fancied) rebelled. He was to die in 1016, swiftly followed by his son, and Sweyn’s son Cnut took the throne.

A hard Cnut to crack.

Aside from how Game of Thrones-y all this is, it not only lays the foundations for the Norman Conquest – arguably the most important event ever in the shaping of English society – but also speaks volumes about the power networks of medieval Europe. Cnut was king of England, Denmark and Norway, and in my slightly biased view, I feel we should educate young people on the extent of our historical contact with our Scandinavian neighbours.

The English unwillingness to engage with pre-Conquest history does not, I feel, stem from its earliness – many of us will have learned about the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans at primary school, and since the advent of Horrible Histories, children have shown themselves not entirely averse to Saxons and Vikings.

Nor do I want to assume that the pre-Conquest is not studied because an English sense of victimhood is better served by focusing on the dastardly Normans. One could argue (and people frequently do, on the comments pages of the Guardian) that the Norman conquerors focus our feelings about the hoarding of wealth and class-based privileges, since the descendants of many a Norman or Breton invader still own the same land and use the same titles as their forebears. On the UKIP side of things, the Conquest is a pure example of the rule of Good Old English law being disrupted by the incursion of European ‘overlords’; and even further to the right, straying into BNP territory, the shifty foreigner has tried to crush the plucky British everyman and has not dampened his spirit – or, indeed, polluted his gene pool. [I sometimes wonder whether Nick Griffin has read Geoffrey of Monmouth. I suspect he hasn’t.]

Perhaps people don’t like the idea that the Church had tremendous power, the country was effectively carved up by powerful families, serfdom and slavery were commonly witnessed states, and the marginalisation  of the ethnically British Welsh and Cornish by the ethnically Saxon English was able to take place, even without the input of the Norman conquerors. That Britain and Ireland could be occupied by the environmentally-friendly, well-educated, socially-liberal, disestablished Scandinavians.  Or that England, and consequently Britain, were for centuries pretty peripheral in the events of European history.

However, I prefer to think that these episodes in English history are not taught in schools because the names are so hard to spell.

Curyeing Favour

I don’t agree with the Daily Mail that the decline of ‘traditional female skills’ like ironing, sewing and massaging one’s husband’s feet is to blame for the downfall of western civilisation. I am the proud wearer of creased shirts, I don’t even have a husband – and, as far as I know, I’ve not caused any recent societal collapses. But I do often wish that I cooked more. So this week I did just that. With the aid of my homegirl Alex, and the chopping skills of the delightful Michael, I made dinner for five people.

The catch? All of the recipes were taken from the fourteenth-century Forme of Curye.

The Forme of Curye gives beautifully clear, step-by-step instructions. Unfortunately, The Forme of Curye lacks any indication of quantities or cooking times, or indeed ingredients for the various spice mixtures it proscribes. My ordinary cooking style is equally as maverick (reindeer and fennel in a port sauce, anyone?), but when cooking for other people I suppose one cannot be quite as gung-ho with food preparation. More’s the pity. There was an added pressure: even though three of us took part in the preparation, I was the only one who could read Middle English. If anyone contracted some ghastly medieval stomach complaint, it could very well have been my fault.

EETS loves us and wants us to be happy.

The following account records our attempts to cook a two-course meal from a six-hundred-year-old book.

Capouns in councy

Take capons and rost hem right hoot þat þey be not half ynouhȝ and hew hem to gobbettes and cast hem in a pot · Do þerto clene broth, seeþ hem þer þey be tender · Take brede and þe self broth and drawe it up yfere · take strong powdour and safroun and salt and cast þerto · Take ayren and seeþ hem harde · Take out the ȝolkes and hewe the whyte þerinne · Take the pot fro þe fyre and cast the whyte þerinne · Messe the disshe þerwith and lay the ȝolkes hool and flour it with clowes.

For capons, we used four large chicken breasts, which we fried lightly in chunks. We then put them in a large pot with a litre of chicken stock and three leeks, chopped into 2cm-wide chunks. The bread part didn’t make any sense, so we skipped it. This simmered for somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes before we added strong powdour.

Gobbettes.

Now, strong powder, also called poudre forte, appears in many of The Forme of Curye’s savoury recipes. As I wrote a few months ago, spices were extremely important to high-class medieval cuisine; although this meal was prepared in a student kitchen, the book is attributed to Richard II’s head chef. We had a lot to live up to. A recipe I found in a shady recess of the internet suggested:

•           1 part ground black pepper
•           1 part ground cubeb
•           ½ part ground cinnamon
•           ¼ part ground mace
•           1/8 part ground clove

Ours was more like 1 part mixed black and red pepper, ½ part cinnamon, ½ part mace. ¼ part clove. [I like mace. So sue me.]

Pre-spice, the meal was looking quite normal.

We added this and several strands of saffron to the broth, and then simmered it for a further 15 or so minutes. In the meantime, we hard-boiled six eggs, sliced them in half and, just before serving, decorated the top of the stew with the egg-halves.

Spynoches yfryed

Take spynoches · perboile hem in seþyng water · Take hem and presse, dele out of þe water and hewe hem in two · Frye hem in oile clene & do þerto powdour douce & serue forth.

Parboil spinach (we used a Sainsbury’s bag’s worth, apparently 260g) and drain it. Hardly a reenactment of the Battle of Agincourt. We didn’t bother with the chopping in two – it’s parboiled spinach, life’s too short – but we did fry them in olive oil with finely chopped garlic, 1 or 2 cloves, because I hadn’t read ahead and didn’t realise we’d be adding sweet powder. As it happens, garlic and sweet powder go pretty nicely.

Poudre douce, as the name suggests, is sweeter than its strong cousin. The same dark recess of the internet suggested:

•           1 part caster sugar
•           ½ part ground ginger
•           ½ part ground cinnamon
•           ¼ part ground nutmeg

Ours had half the caster sugar and twice the cinnamon. We also used it in our pudding. This was stirred in after the pan had been taken from the heat. The spinach was put straight into bowls on top of the broth. We didn’t make our own bread.

Rosee

Take thyk mylke, seeþ it · Cast þerto suger a gode porcioun, pynes, dates ymynced, canel & powdour gynger and seeþ it and alye it with flours of white rosis and flour of rys, cole it, salt it & messe it forth · If þu wilt in stede of almaunde mylke, take swete creme of kyne.

This was the most time-consuming of the dishes, since it needed to be chilled for a while – though someone did point out that the Middle Ages was probably rather low on fridges, and that we were therefore cheating. I am hardly wracked with guilt.

Chip chop.

Anyway, I used a pint of skimmed milk (probably a mistake), which was simmered with five tablespoons of corn flour until it was basically a white sauce, then we added 500 ml of single cream, three teaspoons of rosewater – the recipe specifies fresh flowers, but it’s January – along with some sweet powder and some extra Demerara sugar. (The almond milk instruction we ignored altogether.)

Whisk optional. Just kidding, you need a whisk.

We simmered this while stirring, then added ten quite large, finely-chopped dates and a handful of finely-chopped pine nuts after taking it off the heat. It was then decanted into bowls which sat in the fridge for an hour or so. These need to be stirred, otherwise a skin forms.

Mmm, slop.

There was significantly too much pudding for five people, and it’s not recommended for diabetics.

 Verdict

The chicken in councy was unsurprisingly spicy, in a robust, wintery sort of way, and a beautiful yellow colour, grâce à the saffron; and it needs a red wine – much of which fortunately we had. It was particularly nice with crusty white bread, and we reconciled ourselves to our lack of baking effort by remembering that the stews and the breads would have been produced in different kitchens anyway. This is historical accuracy in action. The spinach was also mildly spicy but, being both sweet and garlicky, the taste reminded me of nothing more than Chinese crispy seaweed. This is no bad thing.

Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1399.

The Rosee pudding, though almost obnoxiously sweet, tasted very delicately of rose and had the texture of a Cranachan.

The response, thank goodness, was generally positive. Aside from Alex, who can’t really eat spices, everyone not only finished their fake capouns, but even had seconds. Someone said it was ‘delicious’; someone else said it tasted ‘like you imagine the Middle Ages’, which I thought was something to do with that smell they pipe into The Canterbury Tales experience in Warwick Castle or wherever it is, but was apparently a compliment; and I came out of it seeming no more eccentric than I did already.

Next Week – We try to catch, kill and cook a deer in the King’s forest, and end up hanged for high treason.

Keeping It In the Family

It is a trope of every American high school movie that the jock whose father wants him to progress to his alma mater before returning home to run the family business secretly dreams of being a poet, or something. Said jock is usually surprisingly sporty, given how sensitive he is, and some variety of recreational showdown tends to be the catalyst for the pushy father to realise how much of a stereotypically pushy father he was being, and allow his son to go to that other Ivy League place (that he secretly got into, and hid the letter, before it was found, despite being hidden; they should definitely switch to the UCAS system – it’s password protected and everything) and become a poet, or something.

Familial occupations were, we have to suppose, fairly common in the Middle Ages, and while there is evidence from later periods to suggest that apprentices may have come from outside the family unit, there would have been nothing irregular in millers’ sons becoming millers, smiths’ sons becoming smiths, and so on. This is, after all, how many European surnames became fixed.

Much of this tradition would of course have depended upon ideas of socioeconomic class, but the rules generally seem to apply across the scale: a farm labourer’s son would most likely have been a farm labourer, while there is a very strong chance that a prince’s son would have been a prince. And while those who became clerics, for the most part, were not the offspring of clerics, one has to assume that for many in the medieval period, a profession was effectively inherited.

Now imagine that your family ‘business’ is sainthood.

This may sound silly, not least because much medieval sainthood is associated with virginity, and virgins don’t tend to have many offspring. However, particularly in the period directly following the Christianisation of Britain, large numbers of Anglo-Saxon royalty were canonised – and not usually for martyrdom. It has been argued that the creation of royal saint-cults aided the transition from pagan rites in which the king would play a priestly role, to Christianity, but as ever there was a great risk of over-egging the pudding.

King Anna of East Anglia is the prime example. The Venerable Bede records the remarkable saintliness of this 7^th century ruler’s immediate family: his son, Saint Jurmin; his daughters Saints Æthelburh, Seaxburh, Wihtburh, Sæthryth and Æthelthryth; his granddaughters Saints Eormenhild and Eorcengota; and his great-granddaughter Saint Werburh. Of these, Æthelthryth and Werburh are the most important, the former being the patron saint of Ely, the latter of Chester, and Bede composed a lovely elegy to Æthelthryth (lat. Etheldreda, Fr. Audrey) – but even by the standards of the day, this is verging on the ridiculous.

‘Why can’t you be more like Æthelthryth?’

I’ve tried to imagine how this family dynamic must have worked. King Anna comes home after a long day of kinging, smiles at his daughter Seaxburh and says, ‘Darling, I’ve found you a husband.’

‘But I want to be a nun.’

‘Well I’m sorry, darling, but can’t you put that off for a bit? This Eorcenberht chap’s awfully nice, and I’m afraid I’ve rather promised you to him.’

‘I say, what rotten luck,’ says Seaxburh, not aware that Enid Blyton wouldn’t be born for 1300 years. ‘Well, alright then. As long as I don’t have to sleep with him.’

‘That’s really between a man and his wife.’

‘But Æthelthryth hasn’t slept with either of her husbands!’

Æthelthryth, the favourite daughter whom no one likes, is scowling in the corner. ‘Don’t bring me into this,’ she says.

So Seaxburh marries Eorcenberht of Kent and they have four children. One day, King Eorcenberht comes home after a long day of kinging and says to his daughter Eormenhild, ‘Darling, I’ve found you a husband.’

‘But I want to be a nun.’

‘That’s what your mother said. Look, darling, Wulfhere’s a jolly decent sort, and Mercia’s not a bad place, and what is it anyway with girls and wanting to be nuns?’

‘A woman can only have full bodily autonomy if she removes herself from the objectifying sexual circulation of the marriage market.’

‘That’s nice, dear. Can’t it wait?’

‘Well, alright then. As long as I don’t have to sleep with him.’

‘Have you been talking to your auntie Æthelthryth?’

So Eormenhild marries Wulfhere of Mercia and they have three children. Wulfhere dies and is succeeded by his brother Æthelred. One day, Æthelred, growing tired of kingship, says loudly, ‘I say, I’m pooped with all this king malarkey. I want to be a monk.’

His nephew Coenred overhears this and says, ‘What an excellent plan. I’ll succeed you.’

‘Don’t you want to be a monk?’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about it, and since my grandmother and all her sisters, and my mother and aunt, and my sister are all nuns, and they don’t get to do any ruling or bashing of skulls – I might put it off a few years.’

Which he does. Then one day he turns to his cousin Ceolred and says, ‘I say, Ceolred, I rather fancy reverting to the fold now. Do you think you might take over this whole kinging business?’

Ceolred is snorting mead off a dancing girl and doesn’t hear the question. Coenred takes his silence for acquiescence.

‘Awfully decent of you, old man. It’s jolly good experience too, and you’ll get to retire to the monastery of your choice.’

Ceolred does hear this. ‘I don’t want to be a monk,’ he says.

The housecarls collectively gasp. The sceop’s harp dwindles tunelessly away. A drinking horn is smashed on the rushes, and the hall falls silent.

‘What do you mean, you don’t want to be a monk?’